Philosophy: Preschool

Alex (3 yrs.) studies the root system of a bean plant with a
magnifying glass.

Freedom and Curiosity

What makes our preschool classes different? It's the special
blend of structure and freedom, unlike anything you will find
anywhere else. Our teachers are trained to "follow the child". They
respect the choice of a little girl, just experiencing the power of
learning to control her pincer fingers, who heads straight for the
tweezers and spends forty minutes transferring beads from one bowl
to another. They observe carefully when a four year old, fascinated
with spatial relationships, decides to experiment with graduated
rods, cylinders and cubes to build a fantastic pyramid. They
encourage the five year old, drunk with the power of sounding out
words, who asks to build phonetic words with the "moveable
alphabet".

Structure and Responsibility

Yet the environment within which these children choose is
extremely structured. The carefully prepared shelves hold a series
of materials, sequenced for increasing difficulty. In the Practical
Life Area, the girl with the tweezers had already mastered pouring
pom-poms, pouring water, the use of large tongs, smaller tongs, and
clothespins, before she was ready for the fine motor control that
tweezers require. In the Sensorial Area, the spatial experimenter
had already learned to put ten cylinders in order from narrow to
wide and from short to tall.

Our graduate trained Montessori teachers have learned to keep
careful written records of the children's choices. At all times
they are circulating throughout the classroom, helping children
choose and complete work. They start each week with a "lesson plan"
for each child, and they present each new lesson at just the right
moment when a child will be challenged, but not frustrated, by
it.

Robin builds short phonetic words with the moveable
alphabet.

Materials that Make Concepts Come Alive

The Montessori materials are designed to make abstract concepts
concrete. A child fitting graduated cylinders into their sockets is
learning about the dimension of thickness.A "control of error" is
built into the material so that the child can teach herself; each
cylinder only fits into one socket.

Maria Montessori, the first woman doctor in Italy, was also the
inventor of the idea of "educational materials". In these days when
so many educational toy stores carry maps that come apart into
separate countries or puzzles with little knobs on the pieces, it
is easy to lose sight of the fact that these and many, many other
ideas were all originated by Dr. Montessori near the turn of the
twentieth century. Over the years, teachers trained in the
Montessori philosophy of material design have added their own
ideas, and our classrooms contain the best of these, including many
materials made by our own teachers.

A properly designed Montessori material "isolates the
difficulty". The color tablets, designed to teach colors, are all
identical in shape and size; they vary only in color. The "baric
tablets" are identical in every way but weight.

Hands-on math materials are some of the most exciting in our
classrooms. Two and three year olds learn to count to ten by
grasping the sections of the "red and blue rods". The two-rod is
twenty centimeters long, shorter than the ten rod, which is 100
centimeters. The rods of different lengths give a visual impression
of the quantities, of what it means for ten to be bigger than
two.

Julia and Reid (4 yrs) build five thousand, two hundred,
seven tens, and three units with the "bank game".

Counting is a complicated process. There is much more to it than
just repeating the sequence of numbers. Three and four year olds
learn the concept of one-to-one correspondence by counting out
individual spindles and placing them in marked boxes. As they say
"one" they pick up one spindle,"two", a second spindle.

Four and five year olds begin to learn about place value. They
count unit beads, ten bars, hundred squares, and thousand cubes to
make numbers such as "four thousand, six hundred, thirty-four".

Creativity

At The Spring School, children experiment. Our art activities
are not the pre-packaged imitation of adult models found in
traditional preschools. In our class, you will never see fifteen
children sitting in a circle, trying to make fifteen identical
Halloween witches, and mostly having their witches made for them by
the teacher! Instead, you will see children experimenting with a
variety of media, from tempera to pastels, from collages of natural
materials to origami paper.

The Spring School's music curriculum is one of the finest
anywhere. Experimenting with the Montessori bells, children learn
about same and different tones, high and low notes, intervals and
scales. Children may begin Suzuki Violin
lessons as early as age 3. We sing each day at circle time, and
learn to move to music.

Shaya and Bryan work with cylinders.

Learning About Friendship

The older the children grow, the more they prefer to work with
friends. Two and three year olds often play "in parallel",
concentrating on the hard work or pouring water, measuring flour,
or fitting a puzzle together. We teach them to respect other
children, to resolve conflicts, to wait a turn for work, and to put
work away when they are done with it.

Three and four year olds more often than not choose to work in
small groups, co-operating on counting the long five chain
(counting by fives to 5 cubed or 125) or writing each other "secret
messages".

Time is the classroom is divided among individual lessons, small
group lessons, and large group circle time lessons.

Each day a different special teacher takes a group of children
for a lesson in French, Art, Movement, or Violin.

Dr. Deborah Knapp, our Director, holds a Ph.D. in Child Development as
well as certification at all levels of Montessori teaching from
Preschool through Elementary School.

Other faculty members bring diverse strengths, from computers to
storytelling, from art to languages.

Steppingstones students explore books in their cozy reading
corner.

Mixed Age Classes

Mixing three and four year olds in one class helps the younger
children learn about friendship by imitating the older. It helps us
balance the social, emotional, and intellectual needs of the
children. A quiet four year old may prefer the company of a younger
child, yet be ready to learn all the short vowel sounds. An
observant three year old may be inspired to learn numbers by
watching an older mentor.

Steppingstones

Our Steppingstones classes provide a gentle introduction to Montessori
education for children who are two years old by the end of September.